gat

would recognize the new opportunity, thus creating far too much of everything for any market to
absorb.
The result: prices would collapse, capital would go unprotected. Using the positive method of
analysis (of which more later), one could easily foresee that continuous generations of improved
machinery (with never an end) might well be forthcoming once the commitment was made to let
the coal genie completely out of the bottle. Yet in the face of a constant threat of overproduction,
who would invest and reinvest and reinvest unless steps were taken to curtail promiscuous
competition in the bud stage? The most efficient time to do that was ab ovo, damping down those
qualities of mind and character which gave rise to the dangerous American craving for
independence where it first began, in childhood.
The older economy scheduled for replacement had set up its own basic expectations for children.
Even small farmers considered it important to toughen the mind by reading, writing, debate, and
declamation, and to learn to manage numbers well enough so that later one might manage one’s
own accounts. In the older society, competition was the tough love road to fairness in
distribution. Democracy, religion, and local community were the counterpoise to excesses of
individualism. In such a universe, home education, self-teaching, and teacher-directed local
schoolhouses served well.
In the waning days of this family-centered social order, an industrial replacement made necessary
by coal lay waiting in the wings, but it was a perspective still unable to purge itself of excess
competition, unable to sufficiently accept government as the partner it must have to suppress
dangerous competition—from an all-too-democratic multitude.
Then a miracle happened or was arranged to happen. After decades of surreptitious Northern
provocation, the South fired on Fort Sumter. Hegel himself could not have planned history better.
America was soon to find itself shoehorned into a monoculture. The Civil War demonstrated to
industrialists and financiers how a standardized population trained to follow orders could be made
to function as a reliable money tree; even more, how the common population could be stripped of
its power to cause political trouble. These war years awakened canny nostalgia for the British
colonial past, and in doing so, the coal-driven society was welcomed for the social future it
promised as well as for its riches.
The Quest For Arcadia
The great mistake is to dismiss too hastily the inducements offered by industrial utopia. Defense
of it on strictly humanistic grounds is usually discarded as hypocrisy, but after some reflection, I
don’t think it is. Remember that many philosophical and scientific minds were fellow travelers in
the industrial procession. Like Adam Smith, they predicted that just beyond the grim factory
smoke and the foul pits where men mined coal, a neo-Arcadian utopia beckoned—we have
already witnessed its evanescent, premature embodiment in Chautauqua. Thus was the stage set
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